A Doubter's Almanac (7 page)

“It did look like it.”

Borland turned. “Young man,” he said, his voice hard again, “plenty of ships have gone down on those rocks, I have to tell you. Men have died trying to outsmart Kamil Malosz.” He lowered his glasses and gazed across the desk at Milo, his eyes stony; but the lips below them expressed a tinge of wryness. Milo was incapable of deciding whether the old man meant him well or ill.

—

O
NE AFTERNOON AT
the mathematics library he returned from drinking a soda on the steps and found someone sitting in his chair. He circled the table and approached from the other end: it was the same girl who’d been watching him before.

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“No. You’re not confused.”

“Did I—”

“You have a minute?”

“For what?”

“For me.”

“Well—”

“To talk.”

Dark, sleepless eyes. A man’s shirt again, her black hair tucked into the collar. “That depends,” he answered.

“On what?”

“On what you want to talk about.”

—

T
HEY MET AT
the Lime Rose, a basement café she knew, not far from campus. He arrived early. She’d arrived earlier.

“Borland’s impressed with you,” she said, the moment he took the seat across from her. The shoulders of her sweater were dusted with rain. At the small table, her face was prettier than he remembered. The same sleepless eyes, but filled now with either sadness or willingness. She had an odd name: Cle Wells.

“How do you know Borland?” he said.

“Everybody knows Borland. Everybody in the math world.”

“And you’re in the math world?”

“Not exactly, but I know plenty of people who are. My dad, for one.”

“Oh?”

“A professor. Of analysis.”

“Here?”

“No. But he knows Hans Borland.”

Milo swallowed. “Okay, then what did he say?”

“That he’s telling people you have promise.”

Milo laughed.

“He’s not exactly famous for his generosity, you know.” She raised her chin at him. “You know that, right?”

“I’m aware of that rumor.”

“Then why’d you laugh?”

“Because I already know what he thinks of me.”

She lifted her coffee to her lips, smirking. “Well, then, indeed.”

“I just don’t know whether he’s right.”

“You don’t know whether he’s right about
you
?”

“No, in fact—I don’t.”

She set down the cup. “Well,” she said. “He is.”

“And how might
you
know?”

She looked out the window. “That’s a little mystery, too, isn’t it?”

“I don’t believe you know any more about it than I do.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong.”

“One of us is, anyway.”

She looked back at him.

“Wrong,” he said. “Clearly.”

“Okay then.” From her bag she produced a pack of Camels. “The Malosz conjecture,” she said, tapping out a cigarette. “Submanifolds, right? In some kind of weird mathematical space. Famously difficult.” There was a pause while she rummaged for matches. “Killingly difficult.”

“All right,” he said. “That’s a way to put it. So what?”

“So that’s just the beginning.”

“Of?”

“Of what I already know about you.”

She blew the smoke over his head, and he ducked to let it pass.

“By the way,” she said, looking straight across at him. “I hope you don’t think I’m trying to seduce you.”

—

T
HE FINISHED QUATRANT
was the size of a kitchen table, its four thickly carved spokes exactly dividing its circumference. One cloudless night late in the winter, he waited for the last coat of lacquer to dry and then lifted the whole structure onto a tripod at the center of the apartment. From there, its outlook bisected the windows.

Just before sunrise, he climbed from bed. Chilly air flowed underneath the door as he sat down and began tallying the sun’s path across the two trapezoidal illuminations of sky. Afterward, he went hurriedly to the library, where he worked his way through a backlogged pile of problem sets.

The next day, he stayed home again, irritatedly dispatching classwork as he recorded another set of coordinates, carefully tracking the low winter orbit that was evolving along his tiny patch of cosmos.

—

H
E WAS A
teaching assistant in two different classes that semester: Differential Equations, which was populated by math majors and engineers, and Calculus for Poets, which was populated by girls. Or at least it included quite a few of them. Differential Equations had none.

Late in the year, he handed back one of the midterms. Professor Rosewater was known for writing grueling exams: there were plenty of Ds and Cs and only a few Bs. One student, a lackadaisical young man from the back row whom Milo had taken for a loafer, had scored 100 percent.

The name on the booklet was Earl Biettermann.

He saved Earl Biettermann’s test for last. He’d already asked the math-department secretaries about him. At the rear of the classroom, the young man sat sprawled in a chair, his scuffed motorcycle boots crossed at the ankles.

“You’re a mathematics major,” Milo said, slipping his exam booklet onto the desk.

“So?”

“So what are you doing in a class like this? You’re taking PDEs and real analysis.”

“And?”

Milo felt a prick of anger. “So, why are you taking Calculus for Poets?”

“Because I happen to be a poet,” said Biettermann.

—

“T
HAT’S SOMETHING
E
ARL
would say,” Cle Wells said, again at the Lime Rose. “That’s definitely something he would say.”

“You know everybody, I guess.”

“I guess everybody knows Earl.”

“The commutative property.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I would call it the associative.”

“Well, no,” he said. “
I
don’t know him, and I don’t really
want
to know him—so it’s not associative.”

At this she smiled. She reached across and tapped him on the end of the nose, a gesture she might have made with a child. “Well,” she said. “It’ll be associative
soon enough
.”

The Newton of North Oakland

B
Y FALL SEMESTER
of his second year, he had his habits. Berkeley had grown familiar to him by now—the stand-up sandwich counters and the head shops, the cars and buses and all the milling crowds. He spent evenings in the library at Evans, working on the Malosz conjecture. A good part of this time was spent poring over papers by other mathematicians. A professor in Kyoto. A graduate student at McGill in Canada. An amateur topologist in Kiev. None of their papers mentioned the Malosz specifically, but he could see what they were doing. They were positioning themselves around its edges.

By now he’d spoken again to Borland, and the problem had become the official topic of his dissertation.

At Evans, the topology journals arrived wrapped in paper, like purchases from an expensive department store. At the circulation desk, the librarian handed them across the counter to him. As he opened the covers he imagined his competitors doing the very same thing at other libraries around the world. Not just the rivals he knew about but the ones he could only imagine: graduate students in Bombay and Moscow and Taipei. Men as focused as he was—or more focused—on unearthing the bones of the universe.

Sitting in the warm quiet of the reading room, he would scan the journals, then settle himself into his work. Into the precise, incremental logic of geometries. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes the hours themselves became numbers, in turn fractionating into other numbers. Minutes. Weeks. Onward he pushed. At this early point, the problem didn’t seem impossible. It was like a great mountain that he was still seeing from a distance.

On the way home one night after a successful evening of work, he found himself stopping at the bar at the end of his block, a dark, windowless place called the Shed. Only a sawhorse marked it from the sidewalk. He climbed down the steep stairs and took a seat at a table in back. Caught off guard when the bartender approached him, he stumblingly ordered a dry sherry. He’d never bought a drink in his life.

Whatever the man brought back, though, it wasn’t a dry sherry.

A few minutes later, moving to a stool by the cash register, he ordered another.

—

T
HERE WERE BEGINNING
to be rumors. Cle reported them. He was an eccentric. A savant from the woods. Isaac Newton in North Oakland. “That kind of thing, anyway,” she said, stirring a hot chocolate with the tip of her finger. Another café, another afternoon. “Your name’s around,” she said. “I keep hearing it.”

Later, as they were buttoning their coats to leave, she said, “I flattered you, didn’t I?”

He reddened. “Hardly.”

She smiled, then reached up and tapped him with her finger on the lips. “Yes,” she said. “Hardly.”

—

T
HE NEXT TIME
he saw Earl Biettermann, they were in a car together. Biettermann was driving. Milo sat in the rear, watching the hair swing from Biettermann’s cap when he dipped into the curves. He was driving too fast. The road was wet from a storm and glinted like ice. But this was California, and warm air was whipping through the windows. They were in the hills, on the way home from a party above campus. An old stick-shift GTO without a muffler. Biettermann sluiced into the curves like a skier, accelerating as he came into the straightaways. Milo was in the backseat, pressed against the door alongside a line of girls he didn’t know. Cle was in front of him, next to Earl. Milo’s gut tightened. It tightened again when the car upshifted. Biettermann wasn’t looking at the road. He kept turning his eyes to Cle, who was throwing back her chin beside him and laughing.

“You didn’t like that,” Cle said the next day when he found her at the Lime Rose. He shouldn’t have gone in, but he did. He should have been at the library.

“Didn’t like what?” he said.

“The way Earl was driving.” She looked across the table at him.

“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t notice.”

She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “I could see that you didn’t.”

—

S
HE WAS RIGHT
about the rumors. Before long, he overheard someone in the lounge call him a savant.

People knew about the quatrant, but nobody had seen it, and nobody seemed to know about his real work. Nobody saw him alone in the stacks reading Akira Kobayashi’s abstruse deductions on the Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem. As he made his way through the paper, his face grew hot. Kobayashi was preparing an assault on the Malosz. That much was clear. Milo looked up at the heads of the other graduate students, bent to their work in the carrels around him like rows of oil derricks. Later, he tried to make his way through Marat Timofeyev’s densely reasoned preprint on algebraic isotopy. Another assault.

His rivals were all unseen. At any time, any one of them could render all his work useless.

And yet the talk about him persisted. His untrained brilliance. His rogue ambitions. The quatrant was the subject of steady questions from his undergraduates, who were eager for the diversion, and sometimes even from his peers, who nodded with pursed lips when he answered, turning away to exhale smoke. All of them were competing for the attention of the faculty. Dissertation topics were discussed like the movements of armies.

He’d become known by now as Hans Borland’s protégé.

It wasn’t from Borland himself that he gathered this information but from another comment he overheard one evening in the department lounge. He didn’t even recognize the graduate student who said it. Again, the sideways turn. The exhaled cigarette.

—

H
ER FATHER WAS
a professor at Carleton College. She told him this the first morning she woke up in his bed.

“Never heard of it,” he said.

“That’s because you’re basically an illiterate.”

“Well, thank you.”

“It’s in Northfield, Minnesota. Kids ride tractors to class.”

He looked over at her.

“It’s a half hour from Minneapolis, you idiot. It’s an excellent school. You can’t get away with the things you can out here.”

“You think I’m illiterate?”

“Yes, basically. You really are an idiot, you know. Socially speaking. That’s one of the things I like about you.”

“About me? That I’m an idiot?”

“You’re charming,” she said. “But it’s an idiot’s charm.”

She kissed him on the mouth. Her tongue had a flavor—the brandied hot chocolate that had been resting by the bedpost since the night before, when they’d come in after a walk from the Lime Rose. As soon as they’d gotten into the apartment, she’d set the cup on the floor, pulled the band out of her hair, and kissed him. “That you even have trouble with the concept”—she said now, pulling back—“this actually proves the concept.”

“It’s kind of thrilling to be called an idiot,” he said. He tried to kiss her again, but she sat up against the headboard and pulled the sheets to her shoulders. He looked at her hidden there in his bed. “It’s not good that your father’s a mathematics professor,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll compare.”

“You to
him
?” She laughed, in a way he didn’t like. He’d noticed that about her already, how quickly she could turn. “My father’s an asshole,” she said.

Those words actually made him look away.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t mind the comparison,” he finally said.

“Maybe you
should
.”

Later in the morning, when he returned from the store with doughnuts and coffee, she was out of bed at last, wearing nothing but his Detroit Tigers T-shirt, kneeling on the floor examining the adjustments on the quatrant. “You didn’t move it,” he said. “Did you?”

“I wouldn’t dare.” She was peering along one of the slots. “It’s really incredible, isn’t it?”

“Not bad for an idiot.”

“No, not bad.”